Yeah, I've often thought about what I'd do instead and there's no legitimate alternative. It might help developers feel better if they had some kind of "friendly name" functionality (ie - if registrations in the Registry had a package-identifier style string alongside), but that also wouldn't have flown when COM was invented and resources overall were much more scarce than they are today.

While they're not "the same", classic COM (or OLE? the whole history is a mess) did actually have ProgIDs, and WinRT introduces proper "classes" and namespaces (having given up global registration for everything but system provided API's) with proper "names" (you can even query them at runtime with IInspectable::GetRuntimeClassName).

Microsoft tried to do a lot with COM when they first released it, it wasn't just a solution for having a stable cross-language ABI, it was a way to share component libraries across multiple applications on a system, and a whole lot more.

> but that also wouldn't have flown when COM was invented and resources overall were much more scarce than they are today.

And this ultimately is the paradox of COM. There were good ideas, but given Microsoft's (mostly kept) promise of keeping old software working the bad ones have remained baked in.